Bug Description

If you click on the global menus the View->Show MenuBar and (un)check it, it won't work, the menu will stay at the 'global menus panel' or whatever it is. In my opinion this option shouldn't exist now, considering that global menus are the future, and also considering that a global menu has the advantage not to keep its own space on the screen :)

most (all?) of the bugs labeled as duplicates of this one are reporting a related issue, but not exactly the same one. This bug seems to be that the "show menu bar" options makes no sense in an environment such as unity and so should be hidden. The duplicates are about environments such as gnome-shell where there is no global menu bar. In that case the "show menu bar" option is broken, which I would think is significantly more annoying but probably affects fewer users (though I count myself among their ranks). I leave it to the maintainers to decide if these are really the same bug.

Confirmed. Purging all the Application Indicators and Appmenu components solved it for me too. Thanks, Thorsten!

Should gnome-terminal be rebuild with "Breaks: appindicator, appmenu" and pushed into updates? As I understand, the improved panel that was released with GNOME 3.2 and that ships with Oneiric essentially implements the same ideas in a different way.

I uninstalled the appmenu because I use the fallback session and noticed that the appmenu was still there hidden under the gnome-panel. I also noticed that if the appmenu is installed the gnome-terminal does not respect the "Show Menubar" option that I usually have disabled. Then I thought I would try unity, and also don't want the global menu there. The odd thing is that the gnome-terminal does not respect the "Show Menubar" option when the appmenu is uninstalled in the "ubuntu" session with unity.

Nevermind, I had set the exported the variable UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 trying to disable the menus following something I had found online. It turns out that was wrong. If you want to disable the global menus you need to unset that variable completely. It is odd that if the appmenu is unistalled and that variable is set to zero that it forces the gnome-terminal menu to show when it is started.

Whether there's a global menu or not, when "show menubar" is disabled, there should not be a menubar *inside* the gnome-terminal window. Right now, when there is no global menu, AND the terminal is configured to not have a menubar, it'll have one until it's toggled twice.

You could argue that the option should not be displayed when that menubar would go to the global menu. But when it's not, it shouldn't interfere with or override gnome-terminal's logic about whether or not to display a menu.

Confirming the usefulness of the upstream bug post. The easiest workaround is to unset the UBUNTU_MENUPROXY environment variable. Should you want that state of affairs to be semi-permanent, the variable is set in two files:
/etc/X11/Xsession.d/80appmenu
/etc/X11/Xsession.d/80appmenu-gtk3
Comment out the contents of those files and gnome-terminal's menu will behave properly. We can also assume you'll need to reset the variable should you be gripped by the need to suffer Unity and the Mac menu.

For gnome-shell users that want a workaround for this bug but want to preserve global menus in Unity then perhaps a better solution is to create a file /etc/X11/Xsession.d/81ubuntu-menu-proxy with the single line content:

Whatever resolution is chosen for this bug, please restore the ability for more Alt+key combinations to pass through to the terminal's application. It is quite frustrating to have Emacs-style Alt+F and Alt+B -- to pick the two I keep running into -- open the "File" and "Tabs" menus rather than move my cursor. (Passing those key combinations through to the application is the major reason I used the "hide menu bar" option.)

jfinkels: ... because I think that's what it is -- a bug. Using emacs style shortcuts in bash is a must for me, but I also want to use mnemonics to access the menu. This is currently not possible because of poor choices for menu mnemonics.

Dan:
The emacs-style shortcuts you refer to are part of bash, so I don't
think removing anything in gnome-terminal would be removing that
functinality in bash, unless that was intentional, which would be very
very mean. :(

There already is an option available via gconf-editor, that has to do
with menu mnemonics. Disabling menu mnemonics in gnome-terminal
enables you to keep the menu bar and still have ALT+F and ALT+B be
passed through to the application running in the terminal.

But I definitely would want this to be a full-fledged option in
gnome-terminal's preferences. That would be sweet.

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 18:52, Dan Bolser <email address hidden> wrote:
> Please don't disable this...
>
> When using gnome terminal, I like to move around the CLI using ctrl-f/b.
> To do this, I need to turn off the menu, so that my keystrokes don't get
> interpreted as menu commands.
>
> This is the only reason I turn off the menu.
>
> It doesn't matter where the menu is... I want it off so I can use
> ctrl-f/b (and other keystrokes) to interact with the cli. Please don't
> break this, because gnome-terminal is one of the best.
>
>
> thanks,
> Dan.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to a
> duplicate bug report (873763).
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/787465
>
> Title:
> View->Show MenuBar isn't working in 11.04 and later in gnome-terminal
>
> Status in “appmenu-gtk” package in Ubuntu:
> Triaged
> Status in “gnome-terminal” package in Ubuntu:
> Invalid
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: gnome-terminal
>
> If you click on the global menus the View->Show MenuBar and (un)check
> it, it won't work, the menu will stay at the 'global menus panel' or
> whatever it is. In my opinion this option shouldn't exist now,
> considering that global menus are the future, and also considering
> that a global menu has the advantage not to keep its own space on the
> screen :)
>
> WORKAROUND:
> 1. sudo apt-get purge appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3
> 2. Logout
> 3. Login
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/appmenu-gtk/+bug/787465/+subscriptions
>

Ugh. I loathe global menus, but I don't want a menubar on my terminal.

Could we maybe just have a dialog box pop up when you uncheck "show menu bar" explaining that if you remove the menu, you'll have to get it back by alt-clicking, or running something in the command line, or whatever?

I think it's safe to assume that if a user wants a terminal and doesn't want a menu bar, that we can probably relax the "usability requirements" a little. This might not be the best approach for, say, Evolution, but this is the terminal. If you want to muck around in the terminal, you'd better know what you're doing anyway.

Just wanted to note that using Gnome Classic (no unity plugin or global menubar app) and launching `gnome-terminal --window-with-profile=trans --hide-menubar` briefly shows the terminal without a menubar, then the window flashes, the prompt moves down to make room, and the menubar appears with another flash. This occurs whether or not the profile indicates to hide the menubar or not.

I'm using gnome-shell, so I'm not suffering from this behavior at all, and I don't know if I still have it either if I were to login using Unity. But I did have this behavior when I first did a fresh install of Oneiric, that much I know.

@Dan Bolser: Gnome Terminal uses only Ctrl+Alt+* shortcuts, so Ctrl+F/B should work normally, and menu presence should not matter. If any Gnome Terminal shortcuts conflict with bash/mc/… ones, please file a separate bug.

I personally can't see why this is a bug in appmenu, it works as expected here. What *is* an issue here is presence of "Show menubar" option, which is confusing for Unity users.

I'm marking it back as affecting gnome-terminal, as we should just hide that option for Unity users (it does nothing, and it can't do anything because the menu is never shown locally).

Running `sudo apt-get install --fix-policy --install-recommends' does not fix gnome-terminal's behavior for me. It installed a few packages, I rebooted the computer, but gnome-terminal does not appear to adhere to its own settings after that.

solution #24 seemed the cleanest one to me and works perfectly, thanks, i love unity, but on this box, due to crappy drivers, i use wmii, this menu showing up in each and every new terminal was very irritating.